Quote (We do well with them…they are worth a try. But realize you need to attract a good deal of players to make it work.) End Quote
Any program you send a good deal of players may appear that your doing well with them. For me, I look at the total amount of rake generated and then look at what I made from that rake. I then compare the amount made with Fulltilt to another program, meaning if I generated $1,000 in rake and made $89 with full tilt, I am making 8.9% of the net rake, not their 20% as advertised. If I generate $1,000 in rake at absolute, I make $250. Thats the bottom line. If I recall someone else said in another post that full tilt charges 100% of the bonuses to the affiliate. Well I would have no problem with that if I earned 100% of the rake but I don’t and its not playing fair. What would be fair is that they charge you 20% of the bonuses like other programs do. Same goes if it is true that they charge you 100% of the payment fees. It should all be relative to your % but it is not, they pass every fee they can on to the affiliate and they keep all the gravy. I also think if your players don’t purchase in the first 60 days you lose them for life. Not very fair, are they begging for affiliates not to work with them. They have one of the lowest commissions in the industry, and if they were more forthcoming with all their bs fees, I don’t think they would have any affiliates signing up because not only do you not make the 20% as advertised which is the lowest in the industry anyway, you make even less than that with all the fees. I think perhaps affiliates get too deep with them before they realize the real deal, and then they don’t want to throw away the player base that they have built so they just take it up the ass. Maybe I am exaggerating a bit as I suppose after the initial bonuses are out of the mix, maybe some affiliates do fair with their 12-15% of the rake, but to me that is just an illussion. If you have $30,000 in net rake for the month and you make $5k, then no one can argue as that is good money and affiliates think they are doing well, which I guess it all depends on how you look at it. For me I am not thinking about the $5k I made but instead the $2500 I lost by not sending those players elsewhere. Perhaps the big affiliates work out a special deal to eliminate these bs fees, who knows. I am not quite there yet to negotiate deals as I don’t have much clout, but I will be curious to test the waters when I do have a little more clout to see what I can and cannot get. I kind of look at it like each player I send is a product that I own. And if all these programs want to buy my product, why would I want to sell to the lowest bidder. Perhaps it is not as cut and dry as that because there is something to be said with poker rooms that have the ability to retain your players which full tilt certainly does, but then you just have to weigh the pros and cons and make the right decision. Its all about the money babe. Full tilt does have a lot of appeal as you can log in any day of the week and play or watch the pros, and we would all have the dead nuts with them if they would just come a little more correct with affiliates. Every decision you make in this business is critical. I think I had a total of 12 players with full tilt when I finally pulled them, and if these 12 people are avid players, over the course of the next few years there is no telling what I cost myself in revenue by sending them to full tilt. Maybe its not much, but it could be thousands. I have to constantly remind myself what it was like to pull a 40 hour week and take down a few hundred lousy bucks, and when I remind myself of this I find myself treating every decision delicately and I can only pray it was the right one.